Lenin's Kisses (52 page)

The money they had earned while performing over the preceding six months was no longer hidden inside their bedding, mattresses, and pillows, and neither was it in their travel chests or anywhere else.

Their money had been stolen.

It had all been stolen by the wholers.

By this point, the thousands of people who’d come to watch the performance had all dispersed to locations along Spirit Mountain, and the sound of their footsteps had already faded. Throughout the rest of the land it was a bitterly cold winter, but here spring had arrived early, and the trees were all putting out new buds. The grass was green, and in the warm air there was a light aroma. In this warm weather, you could stop anywhere for the night. You could sleep under the eaves of a house, next to a ditch, under a tree, or on a stone.

The wholers escorting the troupe had all disappeared without a trace. As for those visitors from nearby towns and villages, they could pay two yuan to rent a mat for the night, or four yuan to rent a rug. Standing on the kowtow steps in front of the Lenin Memorial Hall, a wholer was calling out loudly:

“Who wants to borrow
¹
a mat?
. . .
Only two yuan each
. . .
”

“Who wants to borrow a sheet?
. . .
Only five yuan each
. . .
”

As he continued shouting, his voice was drowned out by the villagers’ cries of alarm. It was as though a thunderstorm had completely smothered the light breeze that had preceded it. These shouts were originating from the side room of the memorial hall, reverberating throughout the land like explosions.

“My god, where has my money gone?”

“My god, someone has cut up my pillow and bedding.”

“My god, we’ve been robbed! Everything has been stolen! How will we ever manage?!”

The first person to return to the side room was One-Legged Monkey, since he walked quickly. He wasn’t carrying any clothing or props, and as soon as he stepped into the memorial hall he went to the room directly across from the crystal coffin. He opened the door and turned on the light, and the scene of the robbery immediately struck him between the eyes. The side rooms in the mausoleum were arranged in suites, one adjacent to another, and in all there were more than ten individual rooms. As soon as One-Legged Monkey walked into the room he saw that the villager who had stayed behind to watch over their stuff was tied up and covered in blood. The villager had a pants leg stuffed into his mouth and had been tossed into a corner of the room like a discarded ball. One-Legged Monkey immediately rushed over to the entrance of the second room and saw that his bedding, which had been carefully folded and left at the foot of the wall, had been ripped open. The clothes he had stuffed into his pillow were strewn about everywhere. Deafman Ma, One-Eye, and Lame Carpenter, together with Six-Finger and Mute, who were usually charged with helping to carry and unload boxes, all slept on the floor, but their chests, bags, and bedding had also been scattered about. The stuffing from someone’s bedding had been thrown into the doorway, and Deafman Ma’s red underwear had been tossed up onto the windowsill.

One-Legged Monkey immediately realized that this was a grave catastrophe, and threw down his crutch and leaped forward on one leg, as though he were on stage leaping over a sea of fire. He grabbed his bedding, and saw that someone had cut it open with a pair of scissors, and that the ten thousand yuan in brand-new hundred-yuan bills that he had stuffed inside was missing. He then checked on the money he had stuffed into his mattress, and found that the mattress had also been ripped open and left with a gaping hole.

He knelt down and started to wail,

“Where has my money gone?
. . .
Where has my money gone?”

That wailing quickly became a wave of sound that echoed throughout the mountains and valleys. Crippled Woman, Lame Carpenter, Blind Woman, Six-Finger, the Mute, One-Leg, Tonghua, Mothlet, Huaihua, and Yuhua, together with the wholers who had come along to cook for the troupe—more than a hundred of Liven’s villagers in all—began wailing and sobbing inside the Lenin Memorial Hall. Some of them leaned against a door frame and stomped their feet, while others sat on the floor hugging their empty cloth bundles, sobbing and abjectly beating themselves. Those who had sewn their money inside their bedding found that their bedding had been ripped open, while those who had stuffed it inside their pillows found that all that was left was wheat and bran. Those who had stuffed their money into the cotton inside their mattresses found the cotton scattered all over the floor. Those who had put their money inside a wooden chest found that the lock of the chest had been forced, or else that the chest had simply been smashed open. Huaihua, who had bought the sort of embossed leather chest that city-dwellers often use and had locked her money and valuables inside, found that the entire chest had disappeared.

Some of the older villagers had placed their money inside metal pails, and wherever they went to perform they would dig a hole beneath their bedding and bury the pail inside, and then would place their sleeping mat and pillow over it. Those villagers had assumed that no one else knew where they had buried their money, but at this point—and precisely at this point—they found their empty pails lying discarded next to Lenin’s crystal coffin.

The people of Liven had been the victims of a devastating robbery.

In the main hall of the mausoleum, next to Lenin’s crystal coffin, there were blind people, deaf people, mutes, and cripples sitting on the ground of the three side rooms. Men and women, young and old—the sounds of their shouts and curses cut through the air like a sharp blade through bamboo. Their voices were alternately hoarse and piercing, and it seemed as though the sheer sound of their cries would be enough to knock over the memorial hall.

Quite a few wholers entered the hall. They had been sleeping in the area around the mausoleum after watching the performance, and upon seeing the villagers cursing the heavens and wiping tears from their eyes, the wholers tried to console them.

They said, “Don’t cry. You can always earn back the money you lost.”

They said, “As long as there is a verdant mountain, how can you be worried about not having enough wood for kindling?”

They said, “The fact that over the past few months you’ve been able to earn so much money despite being disabled is simply breathtaking.”

After reassuring the villagers in this way, the wholers began to feel drowsy, and retired to go back to sleep.

Under the blazing white light, the crystal coffin emitted a bluish glow. It was as if the coffin were made not of crystal, but rather of cold, hard jade. After shouting and wailing for a long time, the villagers eventually stopped. They stood in the main hall of the mausoleum, a few on the left and a cluster on the right, and this dark crowd of people all directed their gaze at Grandma Mao Zhi.

Grandma Mao Zhi’s face was covered in a thick layer of dust, but beneath it she was as pale as death. She stood woodenly at the head of the coffin, her crutch resting on the middle of it. Her black satin burial clothes lay in a bundle on top of the bluish crystal coffin, as naturally as a needle and thread in a needle basket or a candle in a candleholder. The blue glow from the coffin was like a cloudless sky, while the black silk burial clothes looked like a sheet of black glass. Both were incomparably bright and powerfully silent.

After Grandma Mao Zhi had finished cleaning the things on stage following the performance, she’d looked at the memorial hall for a while before returning there. After deciding that Chief Liu would probably not arrive that night, she sighed and limped back.

It was already so late that the moon had begun to set and the stars had begun to fade. The memorial hall was high in the mountains, and it was as if the mountain ridge were lifting it up into the sky. Everything was extremely peaceful, and the wind blowing under the eves of the building produced a quiet whisper.

It was at this point that Grandma Mao Zhi heard the cries and wails inside the memorial hall. Limping, she rushed to the side room where she and her four granddaughters had been staying, but all she found was Yuhua sitting on her reed mat grasping her bedding and sobbing, “I couldn’t even bring myself to spend money to buy a single piece of clothing!
. . .
I couldn’t even bring myself to spend money to buy a single piece of clothing!” Mothlet was also sitting on her mat, grasping her pillow and saying, “After dinner it was all still here, and before I left to perform I could still feel it here!” Huaihua and Tonghua were standing on their respective mats, but the blind Tonghua was just staring darkly ahead, without saying a word, as though she had already foreseen the theft. Huaihua, meanwhile, wasn’t crying, and instead merely stomped her feet and complained, “Great, this is just great! Now you don’t need to complain that I can’t bring myself to spend any of my money. You don’t need to say that I treat buying a cotton shirt as though I were being asked to purchase an entire wheat field.”

Grandma Mao Zhi stood in the doorway looking at her four granddaughters, immediately realizing what had happened. Then, she hobbled over to the door of the second side room and peered inside.

She hobbled over to the door of the third side room and peered inside.

She hobbled over to the door of the fourth side room and peered inside.

After she had looked inside seven of the side rooms, she abruptly turned around. It occurred to her that she should look for one of the higher-ups—one of the wholers from the county—to tell them what had happened.

However, when she ran to the side room behind the coffin, she opened the door and immediately noticed that the wholers’ clothing and bedding were no longer there. The room had been left completely bare.

There wasn’t a trace of anyone.

Grandma Mao Zhi’s heart lurched, and she felt as though there were a heavy chunk of ice pressing down on her chest. She rushed outside and over to the front of the stage, at which point she noticed that the two trucks that had been shuttling them around for the preceding six months were both gone. Instead, there was only a set of tire tracks and some kindling.

Standing in the entrance to the memorial hall, Grandma Mao Zhi leaned her hand against the cool redwood door frame, then collapsed.

She didn’t shout or cry, but rather just sat there on the stone floor without moving. After a long pause, after the people who had come to check out the scene had walked past her and gone back to sleep, she returned to the crystal coffin, and called to all of Liven’s villagers to come over. She also summoned the young man who had stayed behind in the main hall to supervise the villagers’ things.

Compared with the other villagers who had gone on tour, the young man was virtually a wholer. He was neither blind, crippled, nor mute, and his only disability was that the fingers on his left hand were permanently stuck together, like a duck’s foot. His hand had been this way since birth, and ten years later it remained unchanged. He squatted down in front of Grandma Mao Zhi, pale as death, as though the villagers’ tragedy was all his fault. He had been beaten repeatedly, to the point that half his face was swollen, his mouth and nose were misshapen, and his normally thin left hand was so engorged that it now resembled that of a normal person. He looked at Grandma Mao Zhi, and then over at the Liven villagers. He felt so guilty that he bowed his head, tears pouring down his face like cobblestones smashing against the marble floor.

Grandma Mao Zhi asked,

“Who did it?”

He replied, “It was a pile
³
of people.”

Grandma Mao Zhi said, “But
who
precisely?”

He said,

“They were all higher-ups—the wholers who traveled with us when we went to perform in the south. It was a big group, at least ten or twenty of them.”

Grandma Mao Zhi asked,

“Why didn’t you call out?”

He said, “They tied me up as soon as soon as they arrived, and stationed someone at the door to serve as a sentry.
⁵
Someone else went through the room turning over the bedding and prying open the chests. They knew exactly where everyone hid their money—it was almost as if they were taking their own belongings.”

Grandma Mao Zhi asked again,

“Why didn’t you call out?”

He said,

“They were all wholers, and they said that if I uttered a word they would beat me to death. Then they taped my mouth shut.”

Grandma Mao Zhi asked,

“What did they say?”

He replied,

“They didn’t say anything. They just said that the world was turned upside down, and now the entire world belonged to you blind men and cripples.”

She asked, “What else did they say?”

He considered for a while, and then replied, “They said that you are all waiting here, but even if you wait until you die, Chief Liu still won’t return.”

After that there were no more questions, and no more replies. The main hall became deathly quiet—so quiet it seemed as if it were completely empty, except for the coffin. In this stillness, the villagers gazed at Grandma Mao Zhi, but to their surprise her anxious expression gradually disappeared, and her pale face regained its normal color. It was as if the winter ice were finally thawing, and beginning to develop a lively atmosphere. There was a hint of flexibility in her expression, but in that flexibility it seemed as though she had suddenly thought of something. It was as if she suddenly had something very important to say.